The Fundamentals of Play (29 page)

“Elbows off the table, Henry!”

“Don’t you be rude to a visitor!”

And as he joined them at the entrance to the room, Harry’s face assumed an expression I had never seen on him before: a pure emotionless tranquillity. It was as if his religion, too, had prepared him for those moments when life flashes its awkward intensity before our eyes. He could, miraculously, handle this—it was the pretty palaver over cocktails that he couldn’t master. He acknowledged Mr. Goodenow with a nod.

“Hello, Nick,” Harry said, holding out his hand. “Come in and have a drink.”

“Come have a Mount Gay and tonic,” Chat supplied eagerly.

In our little group conversation began again in earnest, like a bandage over a sore.

The attendants closed ranks; Daddy tried to reason. “I’ll ask him to go, Kate. Right now.”

“No, no, would you just stop it! Leave him alone!” In the background Uncle Goodie could be heard, proposing garrulous toasts.

“Quiet, dear! Quiet, Kate, quiet down.” Mrs. Goodenow emerged from the wings to manage the scene.

“I want to talk to Nick! Let me talk to Nick!”

“Kate, darling, remember your guests.”

“If you don’t let me talk to him, I’ll—I’ll break something! I swear I will!”

“Art, she’s hysterical. I’ll take her downstairs.”

“No, Mother! Nick and I are friends! We’re still friends!”

“Don’t forget that you’re engaged, young lady!” Mr. Goodenow warned, with a hand around Kate’s upper arm.

“Art, I will deal with this.”

“You don’t understand! Nick’s my best friend! He’s my best friend!”

But eventually Kate allowed herself to be led away. She cast an eye back. At first I thought she was gauging our reaction, and I raised my glass in a salute meant to imply good show in the face of adversity. But then I saw that her eyes sought out Harry—Nick had been urged on toward the bar by Chat—and, averting my eyes, I realized that she had just come as close as she could to loving him, for what he had done. She wanted him to turn around and console her with a glance.

Walking heavily forward, Harry passed a hand over his skull.

Slowly, one by one, the Cold Harbor mothers left their husbands’ sides and surrounded Nick at the bar.

“Were you in the Caribbean, Nick?”

“Did you go to the Bahamas, Nick?”

“Did you go to St. Barth’s?”

“What kind of a boat is it?”

“Did you cross the Atlantic?”

“Are you going back, Nick?”

“How’d you get so tan, Nick?”

Having settled his new guest with a drink, Harry withdrew a few paces and stood rocking forward onto his toes, sipping his drink
through the plastic stirrer. No one noticed him, and he hardly seemed to notice himself. He looked a million miles away, utterly distracted, but with the air of someone who rather likes his distractions. Perhaps he was contemplating the fluctuations of the market, or the rate at which sand falls off a sandpile. It was November, and the wedding was set for June. He had less than a year to go before she was his.

I had wondered, going into the party, at the Goodenows’ placid acceptance of their daughter’s choice, why nobody seemed to mind doing business with Lombardi and Son. But it seemed I had underestimated everyone, most particularly the Goodenows. Like all surviving clans, they had an instinct for self-preservation; it was often said of Kate that she was a “smart girl.” Nobody had doubted that she would pick a winner.

I
t was the last weekend of May when Nicko found out he wasn’t going to be asked back, the school’s way of intimating that he had flunked out. They decided to let him sail that weekend anyway. It was the last regatta of the season—the high school team-racing championships—and he could go home afterward; it was the least they could do.

The championships were in Newport that year. I had not been there since I was little, and I have returned only when circumstances have made it unavoidable. Once, in college, my girlfriend Ann Callow wanted to see the Astor mansion for a paper she was writing on the architecture of the Gilded Age. I drove her there and I sat in the car. I have never hated a town in quite the same way I hate Newport. I hate the crowds and the cruising Camaros and the ice cream stands and the fudge and T-shirt “shoppes,” and the cigarette butts that line the cliffs around the mansions; but I hate the mansions, too. I used to muse about the source of my intense dislike, until one day I overheard Robbins telling somebody that Newport was the best town in New England for summer nightlife, and I knew at once why I cannot
stomach that town: Newport doesn’t belong where it is. The town has nothing to do with New England; it is like a girl who affects artlessness. It ought to be called New York Port. I met Kate in Massachusetts, in corduroys and Bean boots, and I always associated her with the northern virtues of cold, because the first thing I knew about her was that she spent her summers in Maine. And I often tried to forget that I’d seen her once in Newport, Rhode Island, in gold lamé.

They put us up in the barracks at Fort Adams. We were winning after the first day, and Mr. Tompkins took everybody out to dinner after we put the boats away for the night. Tompkins felt so bad about Nick’s getting kicked out, and so sorry for himself that the sailing team was going to go down the drain, that he bought Nick his own beer and gave Kate sips of his daiquiri when the waiter’s back was turned. It was a given at school that she could get away with anything. So could Nick, in a different way—at least that’s what we had thought. Boarding schools were different then; they were stricter on the surface, but nobody really cared when you broke the rules, and the last thing any self-respecting parent would have considered was a lawsuit. After dinner we were supposed to go back to Fort Adams and hang out with the other teams till lights out. But Nick slipped away while Mr. Tompkins was getting the van, and Kate slipped away with him. They went down to the piers and waited till dark, and that was the night he tried to persuade her to run away with him. They were going to go down to the Caribbean—it was just as Chat had said—and live on a boat, and get jobs down there. Flip-flops, endless summer: he had it all planned out.

When it was over and she’d told him no, Kate sneaked into the boys’ barracks and woke me up. She told me Nick was gone. He had taken a boat and left. I remember being conscious of having to rise to an occasion, something larger than myself, and of failing miserably. I wanted to comfort her but I was so tired and so sad—and now we would lose to St. George’s for sure—that I started crying myself.

“Shut up! Shut up, will you? Shut up!”

“But they always beat us!” I cried. “And now they always will!”

Kate seized me by the shoulders and shook me into a teary, frightened silence. “Who cares about a stupid sailing team!” She took a handkerchief from a little evening bag and wiped my face with two strokes. A bracelet set off the fine bone of her wrist, and I noticed she had changed her clothes since dinner. She was all dressed up in stiff, glittery garments. “Don’t you want to have fun tonight?”

I got hold of myself and told her I did. But what if we got caught? The fear was always, always there for me. I was never not conscious of the money my parents were spending to send me to Chatham; I could not afford to get into real trouble.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Kate, derisively. “I’ve got a note from Granny.”

We sneaked out of the barracks. Outside there was a taxi waiting. She already knew how to do things like that—how to run her life at the utmost convenience, make the taxi wait, have things delivered. We got into the backseat. Kate gave the address and, groping on the floor of the cab, produced a bottle of vodka. “Now you have to do shots till we get there,” she ordered. “To catch up.” I did a couple of shots and Kate was satisfied. She sat back against the seat. “Where are we going?” I said.

“Granny’s,” she said. “I’ve just come from there.” She took my hand and held it.

It was thrilling and yet too abysmally torturing to hold her hand and think of Nick. “Is Nick—?”

“Oh, shut up about Nick! He’s gone and he’s not coming back. And it’s his fault. It’s all his fault, don’t ever forget. You can’t help people who don’t help themselves.” She snatched her hand back and tipped up the vodka bottle to drink a long shot. “You’re not allowed to mention Nick,” Kate said. “That’s the rule tonight.” As quickly as it had come, the scorn vanished from her face. She lay her head against my shoulder. She smelled lovely—expensive. “We’re almost there.”

It was a great white house on top of a crag that jutted out above a private beach. The house had its own little guard station at the foot of the driveway, like a toll booth, with a barrier. Kate had the taxi drop us at the gate because she wanted the fun of sneaking past the guard. We ducked under the arm of the booth, and got halfway up the lawn when the man came after us with a flashlight. “Who is it? Who’s there?” “Kate!” I urged, but she wouldn’t say a word. I would be caught, blamed, dismissed—kicked out like Nick. She played every game to the death. The guard ran up and shined a flashlight in our faces. “Oh, it’s you, Katie! Why didn’t you say something?”

“You should have recognized me, Roger,” Kate informed him.

“Well, whyn’t you stop and say hello?”

“I’m busy, if you must know. I’ve had a terribly busy night.”

“You got a friend tonight, Katie?”

“Yes! It’s my boyfriend!”

“Your boyfriend, huh?”

“That’s right!” Kate said, jutting out her chin.

“Aw … well, you kids go on and have fun.”

“ ‘You kids go on and have fun,’ ” mimicked Kate.

We confronted the house. The first-floor windows had all been thrown open, and the synesthesia of warm light and clinking glasses and the high-pitched punctuations of laughter and the smell of the sea and the salty sea grass made me think I would forever conjure up this house, this moment, when anyone said, as Kate did presently: “It’s the first party of the summer.” Almost imperceptibly, her voice trembled when she added, “It always is.” I glanced at her curiously. Her face in the moonlight seemed to falter; she looked daunted for a moment, as if even she doubted it was hers, as if even she doubted her capacity to rise to the challenge of taking her place over the next decade.

As we hesitated, a man and a woman emerged from the shadows of the front porch. They were in evening dress. The man lit a cigarette and leaned over the railing of the porch as he inhaled. The
woman patted her hair into place, curving her neck like a swan. He made a joke out of the corner of his mouth and the woman laughed. She was silvery blond with long, thin limbs. I remember she seemed very vain to me. They both did, because they were oblivious of the sea, and of Nicko’s being out on it. When they spotted us, the woman’s face soured slightly and the man looked bored and drunk and annoyed—stupefied, rather. I felt the sick shame of the party crasher wash over me. But surely they would recognize Kate!

But they didn’t seem to know her. And their rudeness seemed to settle something in her. Her face hardened. She tossed her head back as if to reaffirm her entitlement and led me up the steps to the porch and into the house.

The foyer was crowded with men and women lingering or traipsing glitteringly from one room to another. I had not yet gotten my bearings when Kate whispered, “I’ll be right back!,” squeezed my hand, and was gone.

I must have stood just inside the door for nearly half an hour. I tried to affect an impatient air of annoyance. I glanced at my wrist several times (I wore no watch) and pretended that I was greatly put out by the behavior of my date—so put out, in fact, that I was not to be approached. My discomfort doubled when I surveyed the throng of people having cocktails and realized that they were far closer to my age than I’d first thought. Many of them looked to be in college or their early twenties—not the age when a fourteen-year-old is more to be indulged than ridiculed.

When people began to eye me and whisper comments to one another, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I made blindly for a room at the end of the hallway. When I reached the threshold, however, I saw that it was a dining room and that a dinner party was going on inside it. The older crowd, it seemed: I had a flashing impression of gray hair and a silver service. I backed away and turned the corner as fast as I could. I found myself in a little alcove underneath a massive stairway, and there I resolved to hide.

I had stood there no more than a minute or two when I heard a
woman’s shoes clicking up behind me. It was too late to move, and anyway, she giggled and said, “What are you doing under there?”

“I’m hiding,” I said.

“I know you are.” She chuckled. “I’m going to hide with you.” And she ducked into the alcove with me.

She was a sweet, drunk woman—a lovely woman, I saw, when I stole a glance at her face, perhaps thirty-five or forty. She had a large cocktail in one hand, which she shot out for balance as, scrunching herself under the stairs with me, she tottered and nearly fell. I put out a hand to steady her. “My husband,” the woman went on, having regained her balance, and taking a sip from the glass, “is out on the porch with Corny Murphy.”

I considered this for a respectful moment. Then I said, “I’m George Lenhart.”

“I know who you are.” My companion giggled. “You’re Jack’s child.”

“Jack?” I said reluctantly. “No—I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

The woman smiled pleasantly at me.

“I’m a friend of Kate Goodenow’s.”

“Goodenow! Ah-hah! One of the cousins.” She finished her drink and reached around and set the glass down on one of the steps above us. Then she ducked back in. “This is fun, isn’t it?”

“Very,” I said.

“Goodenow,” she said again. “Are you with Vivi? You can’t be with Cee Cee!”

“No, you’re right,” I admitted. “I came with Kate.”

“Kate?” the woman said blankly. “Oh,
Kate
! It’s funny,” she observed. “One never thinks of Kate.”

This was so far from the case at school, where everyone constantly thought, talked, and wildly conjectured about Kate, that I didn’t know what to say.